The Seafaring Dream
The idea was first suggested to me by rabican, who leadeth me to crack water. And two_if_by_sea maketh me drink the crack water.
Hornblower is sixteen, and he dreams about the sea. The notion may be familiar to you: if so, the content will be familiar, too. He dreams about the sea. Storms and sunsets, halyards and bowspirits combined with the intricacies of taking a heavy-gunned seventy-four through stormy waters as opposed to the way that a smaller ship almost bobs on the waves by comparison. The freedom of a ship's captain is the widest freedom on Earth, though in these dreams, sometimes he is a midshipman, and sometimes he is a lieutenant. There are a few dreams where he is a captain and has the deck to himself and paces up and down the side, looking at a tropical island that lies to their port side.
When Hornblower wakes, the dreams are still very much with him. Nevertheless, he leaves his bed. He dresses, makes sure his clothes are decently in order. Studies until it is light, and then he goes down to the dining hall, gets breakfast, and goes to the Infirmary to tell Bush all about his latest dream.
The Gryffindor statuette next to Bush's bed has to be bribed with a bit of bacon. Bush himself is usually still asleep depsite the racket of his sisters and mother making a horrid fuss, through the the bedside photograph, to wake.
...
"I don't know why you keep dreaming about it. You should ask the nurse for something to make you sleep. Or brew it up yourself. I'm sure the Potions Master would let you have the ingredients."
Bush was eating his breakfast -- more properly, he had finished eating the breakfast that the Infirmary supplied, and now, he was starting in on the provisions that Hornblower had brought him. He was having toast with butter, three eggs, four sausages, and six slices of tomato, each slice of which was watery and pale-looking as Bush liked them. Hornblower had carefully wrapped those last up with a napkin to keep them from dripping down his arm while he walked to the Infirmary; containment charms seemed not to work so well on them, and Bush had tucked the other napkin that Hornblower brought him under his chin.
"There's fruit, too. Nothing at the table, of course." Hornblower concentrated on making sure that he was getting everything out of his sleeves. Bush eyed, rather suspiciously, the object that Hornblower set on the bedside table. "But I'm starting to get results with my Season Shifting spells in the greenhouse, so I've got mangoes and pawpaws for you. I think that I've got them tasting right."
It made for an exotic-looking mountain on the beside table. Bush considered them. After a while, he turned back to Hornblower. He was frowning, and Hornblower fidgeted.
"Slughorn would give you the ingredients if you wanted. He's not only the head of your house, but he's been trying to make a project out of you, too."
It was bright and remarkably sunny in the Infirmary, and after a rather awkward moment, Horatio dug into his sleeve and pulled out a tin of candied pineapple and set it on the bed.
"He gave that to me last night. You can have it too, if you like."
The napkin tucked under Bush's chin was from the Slytherin table. At the corner, a green snake bit its own tail and turned about in a circle; during their conversation, the Gryffindor statuette had jumped up from the floor, and it was now napping at the foot of the bed in a patch of sunlight. Hornblower rubbed its ears, and the lion sighed in its sleep and rolled over onto its back to have its stomach rubbed.
It was quiet in the infirmary for a bit more. Eventually, Bush went back to eating, and Horatio got the seventh-year Arithmancy book out of his sleeve to quiz Bush on it.
...
Bush, unsurprisingly, played Quidditch. He captained his house team as an outstanding Beater, though he could play any of the other positions, particularly Keeper, in a pinch.
More surprising, as a general rule, was how well Hornblower played: he was a half-decent Seeker. He had the reflexes and the coordination, though not the taste for flying. The spinning and dipping of the horizon still made him sick for the first fifteen minutes of a match; that sick feeling had come back to him when he was kneeling next to Bush on the grass of the pitch.
Hornblower's broom twitched and smoked nearby. A crowd was coming, and the separate pieces of Bush's broom still whizzed about the seating towers. The Snitch was there, somewhere, too. Hornblower's hands bled because Bush was bleeding from the back and the side, but Horatio was not sure how Bush had been cut.
It had been a mid-air catch. Bush weighed more than Hornblower did, and they had been fling so far above the pitch that lofting spells were likely to be inaccurate. Hornblower had sent his broom diving a hundred feet to catch Bush, and now, Bush did not move, except to close his eyes and smile a little, so Hornblower caught Bush's face in his hands.
When Bush was lifted into the stretcher, there was a glint of gold in the grass: Bush had taken the Snitch down with him. It was in the grass, stunned, maybe, by having Bush land on top of it. In a daze, Horatio took it in his hand and held it up for Slytherin.
They had known each other before -- ever since Bush had badly needed a tutor in Arithmancy during his sixth year -- but Slughorn did not send invitations to Hornblower until after.
...
"And here," Bush said. "We have Hornblower, who saved my marks last term and my life this term."
Hornblower pretended that he had been startled out of reading his Transfigurations text. It did shock him a little, though, to look out of the book and find Bush standing so close to him, and there was, Gerard, dark and handsome in Ravenclaw blue. Hornblower could guess that they talking about broom reconstruction; Bush and Gerard were friendly despite their respective captaincies, and Hornblower had seen Bush and Gerard play individual Quidditch against each together. Gerard was a Chaser; after ten minutes, the matches devolved into Bush lobbing Bludgers at a whooping, diving Gerard who pelted Bush with Quaffles and rocks and any other firepower he could find.
They talked about Quidditch and girls a good deal.
"Spectacular piece of flying," Gerard said and stuck his hand out to be shaken. "Probably the best I've seen at this school."
Hornblower shook the hand.
There was more silence. Hornblower thought about his coffee, which he'd charmed back into being hot so that he could dissolve more sugar in it; he'd stayed late at Slughorn's that night. He'd been issued a personal invitation by the Head Boy himself, and eventually, Gerard cleared his throat and made a show of looking down the table. "We'd better get going, Bush. I don't think Slytherin likes us standing so close to next year's prefect and their future Head Boy."
Hornblower found, with a bit of a flush, that Bush was still studying him. And it was true. Bush and Gerard were drwing some hostile looks. That morning, Ravenclaw had gotten fifty points at Slytherin's expense in third year Herbology.
Before they left, though, Bush bent down and grasped Hornblower's shoulder. "You're still having those damn dreams about going to sea, aren't you?" He whispered into Hornblower's ear; his hand was large. "Meet me in the broom workshop shed an hour before dinner."
...
"It's not done, but I've got access to the woodworking equipment until the end of term. I might as well do something with it. If everything works out, we'll be able to take it onto the lake a few times before the summer. It'll be my seventh year project."
The broom workshop was a loft above the broom not-really-a-shed, and at the moment, the boat consisted of two boards that stuck out from the side of the rib. Through the window, Hornblower could see that it was still gray and wet and autumn in Scotland outside. Hornblower had, in fact, very little notion of how to build a Muggle boat, but Bush looked enthusiastic. On the lathe behind him, there were the beginnings of what looked like a broomstick.
Bush was smiling at him with his head tilted to the side. There was a brown sack off to the side and what looked liked a brown jug of butterbeer. Hornblower was willing to bet there were sandwiches in the sack, and the butterbeer was spiked with Firewhiskey. Bush was still smiling at him.
Hornblower cleared his throat. "Passing the Foreign Runes NEWT is supposed to be your seventh year project, Bush."
...
"The goblin rune for tha, future leaping participle?"
"Um, the rune for Ke, root, with three arms sticking out the side."
"Left or right?"
Silence. Bush had decided that if he could make a broomstick entirely by hand and wand from a block of wood and carefully selected but thoroughly unmagical twigs from the Forest, he, great-great grandson Frances Hinkelfoot the Seafarer, direct descendant of Godric Gryffindor, could damn well make a Muggle boat entirely by hand. His fingers were plastered with No-Bleed charms.
"Le -- no, ri -- ah." A pause, followed by squinting at the nail to see if it was straight.
"Actually, they're up the Rune professor's arse and around the corner to his throat." Before Hornblower could correct him, Bush banged his thumb again, and as Hornblower was putting a new No-Bleed charm on, Bush muttered and looked, ruefully, at the blood he'd dripped onto the boat and, now, onto the knee of Hornblower's trousers. Hornblower had decided that he wanted a flatbottomed rowboat without a keel, and he'd been able to locate a design scheme for Bush.
"You ought to quiz me on Defense. Or Divination. I'm good at those," Bush said, but Hornblower paid him no mind and continued to rub Bush's hand to make sure that none of the No-Bleed charms would come loose. His mouth was very close to Bush's skin.
...
A memory from Bush's sixth year and Hornblower's fourth: it was a Hogsmeade weekend in early December. Bush was walking back with Gerard and members of both the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Quidditch team. There was snow on the ground; more was coming down, and at the second turn in the bend, Bush told his friends that he would see them back at the castle, then jogged back to Hornblower, who was walking alone and was shivering with cold without robes.
Through sympathetic questioning, Bush learned that the school had reduced Hornblower's scholarship because they had discovered that he had a great-grandfather who had been a wizard. The one he held was only available to students without any wizarding ancestry; all the ones with some wizarding ancestry had been taken. A scholarship from the General Fund would keep him in school, but he had no pocket money, and Hornblower had lost his winter robe trying to raise some by playing Exploding Snap.
Bush was too tactful to offer his own robes, though he did try to press some of his own pocket money on Hornblower. Hornblower refused, though he looked very odd and emotional while refusing it. In the end, Bush was only able to persuade Hornblower to let himself be taught a warming charm that lasted longer and warmed more deeply than what second-year Charms taught, and they walked back, through the snow and the trees, into the deepening night.
...
"If you don't have family, where do you go in the summer?"
"The Long Rooms, on Diagon Alley. It's the red-colored door with the knocker in the shape of a frog. The owner of the place, Sainte-Croix, lets me sleep in the back room if I run errands and wash dishes and play cards with anybody who wants it."
Silence while Bush digested this information.
"I'm lucky. If my father had died a month earlier than he did, the Muggle authorities would have put me in an orphanage. I'd have to go to one of those in the summer."
...
Bush was not rich. His father had been a builder of charmed wooden furniture, and he had four sisters and a mother. The oldest sister lived in London, but there were two other Bushes at Hogwarts, and when they were all home in the summer, they crammed into a cottage north of Chichester. Bush was, in fact, poor. It was how he had learned to make his own broom and how he had learned good warming spells -- expensive robes were woven with the charms in the lining.
He was good at Quidditch, too, and he was good with his hands and item-based charms. During the episode where the Chamber of Secrets had been opened, Bush kept his head and organized the Gryffindor dorms so that none of them died. If his marks in Astronomy and Arithmancy hadn't been so poor, he would have been a prefect, and through that fall and through the winter, he made time to work on the boat.
When the weather turned fair, he moved the boat outside, and as the weather warmed and the NEWTs apporached, he took to working on the boat during the afternoons, with his shirt off and in the sunlight. Hornblower sat on a stump and asked him questions from his textbooks.
...
The first Quidditch match of the spring had Slytherin playing Ravenclaw. Gerard was barred from playing because he had been caught in the Hufflepuff girls' dorm the week previous, and after a bit of subterfuge, Hornblower caught the snitch in the fifty-fourth minute of play. Slughorn congratulated him heartily, on the pitch, and made a great show of inviting him, in front of everyone, to the next Slug Club supper.
"Athletic ability and academic talent. It's a rare combination. You'll be an important man someday. A very important man. We've missed you at our little parties." Slughorn beamed at him, and Hornblower blushed to the roots of his hair and wondered how he might escape having to go on Tuesday. He felt very shabby compared to all the other students there; until the end of the year, his shoes were clevely transfigured potatoes, and he had to take care to discard each pair before they started sprouting.
...
"Oh sweet Mer -- "
"All rowboats leak, Hornblower. The book you showed me says so. It is entirely natural that there should be some -- "
They ended up having to swim for shore. Hornblower had to bribe the merpeople with half a dozen kippers to let him raise the rowboat from the lake.
...
After another two attempts, Bush learned what he had done wrong, and after that, the boat no longer took so much water that she would sink within half an hour. In fact, Hornblower decided that he was rather fond of the fact that water pooled in the bottom; as the weather grew warmer, it was pleasant to stretch his legs into it. It was as though they had a lake within a lake, and he could put his toes into it without worrying about things inside the lake chewing on them. The squid had recently snatched two first years and given them a thorough dunking.
The sun was out this afternoon, and Hornblower watched as one of the lake's flying fish broke the surface and went skimming along, leaving a furrow behind it on the surface of the water.
"Look at that!" exclaimed Hornblower, sitting up straight and setting Bush's Arithmancy text aside from a moment.
"A flying fish." Bush was stretched on the other side with a paddle cradled against his chest. He swore that the boat talked to him and told him that she wanted a larger sister. One that could actually go onto the ocean, one that was powered by sail and wind. He told Hornblower that it was his interest in Muggle Studies that led him to want to make another.
"Yes! There's another!"
Hornblower leaned over to get a better view; the rowboat tipped to one side precipitously, and Bush had to shift his position tso that the rowboat wouldn't tip them into the water -- again.
"You've seen them before."
"But I've never seen one while I was sitting in a rowboat. They're fascinating creatures. In Naturalis Magica, Pliny says that reticulated flying fish like these have a stone in their stomachs that, when ground up with certain herbs, prompts highly accurate vision of the future. It's been used historically by a nu -- "
"I wish you'd be this forthcoming about Maria Weasley. She's sweet on you. And I know, for a fact, that she was waiting outside the Slytherin common room for you yesterday."
Hornblower spluttered -- Bush had flustered him to the point that he almost dropped the book into the lake, and then, he had to recover from the embarassment of the whole thing. By then, Bush had well and truly fallen asleep in the sunlight on the other side of the boat. The paddle was still cradled against his chest, and Hornblower had to nudge him on the chest with toes cooled, for that specific purpose, in lake water.
...
"I've never met anybody else with even one Muggle parent."
"You have. Lots of them. Your Keeper, Turpin, has two. He NEWTs sugar and coffee home to his parents -- the Muggles have had limited access to all kinds of things for years, Bush. They're fighting a war just like we are."
Bush seemed skeptical. It was, in fact, hard to think of Wizarding England being at war in any way; it was so peaceful on the lake, and these days, the professors only talked about preparing the seventh-years for their NEWTs. Hogwarts dinners continued at their usual munificence.
"There's nothing about that in our Muggle Studies books."
"That's because they're fifty years out of date. I'm telling you. Muggle England is at war. It has been for years." A pause while Hornblower dragged his fingers through the top of the lake. Flying fish -- not flying now, but with their wings tucked along the sides -- swam up to nudge his fingertips.
"Also," Hornblower said, just thinking of it. "The Head Boy. I don't know whether both of his parents were Muggles, but he goes home to a Muggle orphanage every summer."
"Splendid fellow," Bush agreed, yawning. He was trying to sneak asleep again and Hornblower nudged him again. The lake water wasn't cool enough to do the trick anymore, so he had to poke Bush in the chest. "Best Slytherin at school. After you."
...
The last Quidditch match of the year was Gryffindor against Ravenclaw, and Bush went after Gerard from the start. It was the last real Quidditch match that either of them would ever play, and it dragged into the night. A three-quarters moon against a clear, early summer sky, and Hornblower watched through Omniculars that he'd won from Hesper Grunion at the last Slug Club. Gerard streaked across its face, and Bush followed; they were outlined on the moon. Gerard was too good to be caught by a Bludger moving on its own, and left on his own, he would have destroyed Gryffindor's Keepers.
Eight minutes after midnight, Ravenclaw's Seeker caught the Snitch. Gryffindor won regardless, though, by virtue of outscoring Ravenclaw with Quaffles. Without Gerard's firepower, Gryffindor's chasers forced a margin of victory -- Bush's chasers. Hornblower would not have guessed it of Bush, steady Bush, stolid Bush who was too unimaginative to do well in Transfigurations or lie in his homework for Divinations class, and he cheered until his throat grew hoarse.
...
It was Bush's last night at Hogwarts, and they were in the rowboat past curfew. The lake looked like it was made from black glass, and it was so still, so warm.
"The Head Boy asked special permission to speak at tomorrow's dinner."
Bush looked exhausted. When they had stood on the pier with the lantern, Hornblower thought he saw shadows and lines on Bush's face that had not been there before. Even with all the preparation, the NEWTs had been trying for him, and he had stubble. They had turned the lantern off after they got onto the water, but every now and then, a patch of moonlight would catch Bush's face. It made him look far older than he usually did.
"It's a good speech. I saw it." Hornblower was still hoarse from the Quidditch match. He tried to say more, tried to say that he had seen a draft of it the Slug Club, but Bush smiled at him, and it was clear that no more was needed. Indeed, as Bush rowed them back to shore, he sang For He's a Jolly Good Wizard, softly enough so that he wouldn't wake the squid, but loudly and distinctly enough so that Hornblower could make out the words and decipher which tune it was.
They carried the rowboat back to the land and settled it in the loft, on blocks, with the oars laid in their holders, and then they went out and stood in front of the broom shed. Bush returned the lentern to its holder and blew the light out, and they stood in darkness.
"Goodbye, Bush."
Bush smiled. "I'll visit the Long Rooms this summer, and you'll have to come see me in Chichester."
They smiled at each other for another moment, but that could only delay the moment a little bit. Hornblower held his hand out for a final shake, and perhaps he imagined it, but Bush let go of his hand almost reluctantly, almost with a caress.
"Goodbye."
...
They meet during the summer, of course, multiple times, and they see each other through the following years. Nevertheles, Bush dies in April in the final year of the war. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named disappears at the end of July, and there is an element of irony about it. Hornblower is the one who becomes an Auror, but he survives the War with nothing worse than a bout of typhus. The war takes his children; Maria dies giving birth to a son to replace what he had lost, but Hornblower, himself, is unharmed. Eventually, in fact, he finds peace in laying his memories into a Penseive that Barbara Dumbledore obtains for him.
He has a new life. He is well-respected at the Ministry, working on the beaurocratic side of the Aurors. If he keeps working at it, he is likely to become Minister. His undignified origins have been entirely forgotten, and yet, even in the years of peace that come afterwards, the one thing that Hornblower, as a matter of practicality, cannot lay aside is the fact that his Patronus looks remarkably like a dog whose form occiasionally bleeds into that of a lion. At those moments, Hornblower, himself, is always thinking of a rowboat. Of spring and arithmancy and a friend with his eyes closed.
There are many happier memories. He has other purely happy memories in his life. He has no idea what happened, after Hogwarts, to either Tom Riddle or the rowboat. He only knows what happened to him and Bush; he never had those sea-faring dreams again after Bush died.
It is ridiculous. It is all ridicluous.
Shut up, bitches. Maybe you can believe that this and this don't immediately telegraph OMFG MUST WRITE FOUR THOUSAND WORD FIC ABOUT HORATIO AS A SLYTHERIN OMFG OMFG HE LOOKS LIKE TOM RIDDLE DOESN'T HE ;____________________;, but clearly. I'm the sane one. You're crazy.
Thanks again to rabican and two_if_by_sea.
Hornblower is sixteen, and he dreams about the sea. The notion may be familiar to you: if so, the content will be familiar, too. He dreams about the sea. Storms and sunsets, halyards and bowspirits combined with the intricacies of taking a heavy-gunned seventy-four through stormy waters as opposed to the way that a smaller ship almost bobs on the waves by comparison. The freedom of a ship's captain is the widest freedom on Earth, though in these dreams, sometimes he is a midshipman, and sometimes he is a lieutenant. There are a few dreams where he is a captain and has the deck to himself and paces up and down the side, looking at a tropical island that lies to their port side.
When Hornblower wakes, the dreams are still very much with him. Nevertheless, he leaves his bed. He dresses, makes sure his clothes are decently in order. Studies until it is light, and then he goes down to the dining hall, gets breakfast, and goes to the Infirmary to tell Bush all about his latest dream.
The Gryffindor statuette next to Bush's bed has to be bribed with a bit of bacon. Bush himself is usually still asleep depsite the racket of his sisters and mother making a horrid fuss, through the the bedside photograph, to wake.
...
"I don't know why you keep dreaming about it. You should ask the nurse for something to make you sleep. Or brew it up yourself. I'm sure the Potions Master would let you have the ingredients."
Bush was eating his breakfast -- more properly, he had finished eating the breakfast that the Infirmary supplied, and now, he was starting in on the provisions that Hornblower had brought him. He was having toast with butter, three eggs, four sausages, and six slices of tomato, each slice of which was watery and pale-looking as Bush liked them. Hornblower had carefully wrapped those last up with a napkin to keep them from dripping down his arm while he walked to the Infirmary; containment charms seemed not to work so well on them, and Bush had tucked the other napkin that Hornblower brought him under his chin.
"There's fruit, too. Nothing at the table, of course." Hornblower concentrated on making sure that he was getting everything out of his sleeves. Bush eyed, rather suspiciously, the object that Hornblower set on the bedside table. "But I'm starting to get results with my Season Shifting spells in the greenhouse, so I've got mangoes and pawpaws for you. I think that I've got them tasting right."
It made for an exotic-looking mountain on the beside table. Bush considered them. After a while, he turned back to Hornblower. He was frowning, and Hornblower fidgeted.
"Slughorn would give you the ingredients if you wanted. He's not only the head of your house, but he's been trying to make a project out of you, too."
It was bright and remarkably sunny in the Infirmary, and after a rather awkward moment, Horatio dug into his sleeve and pulled out a tin of candied pineapple and set it on the bed.
"He gave that to me last night. You can have it too, if you like."
The napkin tucked under Bush's chin was from the Slytherin table. At the corner, a green snake bit its own tail and turned about in a circle; during their conversation, the Gryffindor statuette had jumped up from the floor, and it was now napping at the foot of the bed in a patch of sunlight. Hornblower rubbed its ears, and the lion sighed in its sleep and rolled over onto its back to have its stomach rubbed.
It was quiet in the infirmary for a bit more. Eventually, Bush went back to eating, and Horatio got the seventh-year Arithmancy book out of his sleeve to quiz Bush on it.
...
Bush, unsurprisingly, played Quidditch. He captained his house team as an outstanding Beater, though he could play any of the other positions, particularly Keeper, in a pinch.
More surprising, as a general rule, was how well Hornblower played: he was a half-decent Seeker. He had the reflexes and the coordination, though not the taste for flying. The spinning and dipping of the horizon still made him sick for the first fifteen minutes of a match; that sick feeling had come back to him when he was kneeling next to Bush on the grass of the pitch.
Hornblower's broom twitched and smoked nearby. A crowd was coming, and the separate pieces of Bush's broom still whizzed about the seating towers. The Snitch was there, somewhere, too. Hornblower's hands bled because Bush was bleeding from the back and the side, but Horatio was not sure how Bush had been cut.
It had been a mid-air catch. Bush weighed more than Hornblower did, and they had been fling so far above the pitch that lofting spells were likely to be inaccurate. Hornblower had sent his broom diving a hundred feet to catch Bush, and now, Bush did not move, except to close his eyes and smile a little, so Hornblower caught Bush's face in his hands.
When Bush was lifted into the stretcher, there was a glint of gold in the grass: Bush had taken the Snitch down with him. It was in the grass, stunned, maybe, by having Bush land on top of it. In a daze, Horatio took it in his hand and held it up for Slytherin.
They had known each other before -- ever since Bush had badly needed a tutor in Arithmancy during his sixth year -- but Slughorn did not send invitations to Hornblower until after.
...
"And here," Bush said. "We have Hornblower, who saved my marks last term and my life this term."
Hornblower pretended that he had been startled out of reading his Transfigurations text. It did shock him a little, though, to look out of the book and find Bush standing so close to him, and there was, Gerard, dark and handsome in Ravenclaw blue. Hornblower could guess that they talking about broom reconstruction; Bush and Gerard were friendly despite their respective captaincies, and Hornblower had seen Bush and Gerard play individual Quidditch against each together. Gerard was a Chaser; after ten minutes, the matches devolved into Bush lobbing Bludgers at a whooping, diving Gerard who pelted Bush with Quaffles and rocks and any other firepower he could find.
They talked about Quidditch and girls a good deal.
"Spectacular piece of flying," Gerard said and stuck his hand out to be shaken. "Probably the best I've seen at this school."
Hornblower shook the hand.
There was more silence. Hornblower thought about his coffee, which he'd charmed back into being hot so that he could dissolve more sugar in it; he'd stayed late at Slughorn's that night. He'd been issued a personal invitation by the Head Boy himself, and eventually, Gerard cleared his throat and made a show of looking down the table. "We'd better get going, Bush. I don't think Slytherin likes us standing so close to next year's prefect and their future Head Boy."
Hornblower found, with a bit of a flush, that Bush was still studying him. And it was true. Bush and Gerard were drwing some hostile looks. That morning, Ravenclaw had gotten fifty points at Slytherin's expense in third year Herbology.
Before they left, though, Bush bent down and grasped Hornblower's shoulder. "You're still having those damn dreams about going to sea, aren't you?" He whispered into Hornblower's ear; his hand was large. "Meet me in the broom workshop shed an hour before dinner."
...
"It's not done, but I've got access to the woodworking equipment until the end of term. I might as well do something with it. If everything works out, we'll be able to take it onto the lake a few times before the summer. It'll be my seventh year project."
The broom workshop was a loft above the broom not-really-a-shed, and at the moment, the boat consisted of two boards that stuck out from the side of the rib. Through the window, Hornblower could see that it was still gray and wet and autumn in Scotland outside. Hornblower had, in fact, very little notion of how to build a Muggle boat, but Bush looked enthusiastic. On the lathe behind him, there were the beginnings of what looked like a broomstick.
Bush was smiling at him with his head tilted to the side. There was a brown sack off to the side and what looked liked a brown jug of butterbeer. Hornblower was willing to bet there were sandwiches in the sack, and the butterbeer was spiked with Firewhiskey. Bush was still smiling at him.
Hornblower cleared his throat. "Passing the Foreign Runes NEWT is supposed to be your seventh year project, Bush."
...
"The goblin rune for tha, future leaping participle?"
"Um, the rune for Ke, root, with three arms sticking out the side."
"Left or right?"
Silence. Bush had decided that if he could make a broomstick entirely by hand and wand from a block of wood and carefully selected but thoroughly unmagical twigs from the Forest, he, great-great grandson Frances Hinkelfoot the Seafarer, direct descendant of Godric Gryffindor, could damn well make a Muggle boat entirely by hand. His fingers were plastered with No-Bleed charms.
"Le -- no, ri -- ah." A pause, followed by squinting at the nail to see if it was straight.
"Actually, they're up the Rune professor's arse and around the corner to his throat." Before Hornblower could correct him, Bush banged his thumb again, and as Hornblower was putting a new No-Bleed charm on, Bush muttered and looked, ruefully, at the blood he'd dripped onto the boat and, now, onto the knee of Hornblower's trousers. Hornblower had decided that he wanted a flatbottomed rowboat without a keel, and he'd been able to locate a design scheme for Bush.
"You ought to quiz me on Defense. Or Divination. I'm good at those," Bush said, but Hornblower paid him no mind and continued to rub Bush's hand to make sure that none of the No-Bleed charms would come loose. His mouth was very close to Bush's skin.
...
A memory from Bush's sixth year and Hornblower's fourth: it was a Hogsmeade weekend in early December. Bush was walking back with Gerard and members of both the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Quidditch team. There was snow on the ground; more was coming down, and at the second turn in the bend, Bush told his friends that he would see them back at the castle, then jogged back to Hornblower, who was walking alone and was shivering with cold without robes.
Through sympathetic questioning, Bush learned that the school had reduced Hornblower's scholarship because they had discovered that he had a great-grandfather who had been a wizard. The one he held was only available to students without any wizarding ancestry; all the ones with some wizarding ancestry had been taken. A scholarship from the General Fund would keep him in school, but he had no pocket money, and Hornblower had lost his winter robe trying to raise some by playing Exploding Snap.
Bush was too tactful to offer his own robes, though he did try to press some of his own pocket money on Hornblower. Hornblower refused, though he looked very odd and emotional while refusing it. In the end, Bush was only able to persuade Hornblower to let himself be taught a warming charm that lasted longer and warmed more deeply than what second-year Charms taught, and they walked back, through the snow and the trees, into the deepening night.
...
"If you don't have family, where do you go in the summer?"
"The Long Rooms, on Diagon Alley. It's the red-colored door with the knocker in the shape of a frog. The owner of the place, Sainte-Croix, lets me sleep in the back room if I run errands and wash dishes and play cards with anybody who wants it."
Silence while Bush digested this information.
"I'm lucky. If my father had died a month earlier than he did, the Muggle authorities would have put me in an orphanage. I'd have to go to one of those in the summer."
...
Bush was not rich. His father had been a builder of charmed wooden furniture, and he had four sisters and a mother. The oldest sister lived in London, but there were two other Bushes at Hogwarts, and when they were all home in the summer, they crammed into a cottage north of Chichester. Bush was, in fact, poor. It was how he had learned to make his own broom and how he had learned good warming spells -- expensive robes were woven with the charms in the lining.
He was good at Quidditch, too, and he was good with his hands and item-based charms. During the episode where the Chamber of Secrets had been opened, Bush kept his head and organized the Gryffindor dorms so that none of them died. If his marks in Astronomy and Arithmancy hadn't been so poor, he would have been a prefect, and through that fall and through the winter, he made time to work on the boat.
When the weather turned fair, he moved the boat outside, and as the weather warmed and the NEWTs apporached, he took to working on the boat during the afternoons, with his shirt off and in the sunlight. Hornblower sat on a stump and asked him questions from his textbooks.
...
The first Quidditch match of the spring had Slytherin playing Ravenclaw. Gerard was barred from playing because he had been caught in the Hufflepuff girls' dorm the week previous, and after a bit of subterfuge, Hornblower caught the snitch in the fifty-fourth minute of play. Slughorn congratulated him heartily, on the pitch, and made a great show of inviting him, in front of everyone, to the next Slug Club supper.
"Athletic ability and academic talent. It's a rare combination. You'll be an important man someday. A very important man. We've missed you at our little parties." Slughorn beamed at him, and Hornblower blushed to the roots of his hair and wondered how he might escape having to go on Tuesday. He felt very shabby compared to all the other students there; until the end of the year, his shoes were clevely transfigured potatoes, and he had to take care to discard each pair before they started sprouting.
...
"Oh sweet Mer -- "
"All rowboats leak, Hornblower. The book you showed me says so. It is entirely natural that there should be some -- "
They ended up having to swim for shore. Hornblower had to bribe the merpeople with half a dozen kippers to let him raise the rowboat from the lake.
...
After another two attempts, Bush learned what he had done wrong, and after that, the boat no longer took so much water that she would sink within half an hour. In fact, Hornblower decided that he was rather fond of the fact that water pooled in the bottom; as the weather grew warmer, it was pleasant to stretch his legs into it. It was as though they had a lake within a lake, and he could put his toes into it without worrying about things inside the lake chewing on them. The squid had recently snatched two first years and given them a thorough dunking.
The sun was out this afternoon, and Hornblower watched as one of the lake's flying fish broke the surface and went skimming along, leaving a furrow behind it on the surface of the water.
"Look at that!" exclaimed Hornblower, sitting up straight and setting Bush's Arithmancy text aside from a moment.
"A flying fish." Bush was stretched on the other side with a paddle cradled against his chest. He swore that the boat talked to him and told him that she wanted a larger sister. One that could actually go onto the ocean, one that was powered by sail and wind. He told Hornblower that it was his interest in Muggle Studies that led him to want to make another.
"Yes! There's another!"
Hornblower leaned over to get a better view; the rowboat tipped to one side precipitously, and Bush had to shift his position tso that the rowboat wouldn't tip them into the water -- again.
"You've seen them before."
"But I've never seen one while I was sitting in a rowboat. They're fascinating creatures. In Naturalis Magica, Pliny says that reticulated flying fish like these have a stone in their stomachs that, when ground up with certain herbs, prompts highly accurate vision of the future. It's been used historically by a nu -- "
"I wish you'd be this forthcoming about Maria Weasley. She's sweet on you. And I know, for a fact, that she was waiting outside the Slytherin common room for you yesterday."
Hornblower spluttered -- Bush had flustered him to the point that he almost dropped the book into the lake, and then, he had to recover from the embarassment of the whole thing. By then, Bush had well and truly fallen asleep in the sunlight on the other side of the boat. The paddle was still cradled against his chest, and Hornblower had to nudge him on the chest with toes cooled, for that specific purpose, in lake water.
...
"I've never met anybody else with even one Muggle parent."
"You have. Lots of them. Your Keeper, Turpin, has two. He NEWTs sugar and coffee home to his parents -- the Muggles have had limited access to all kinds of things for years, Bush. They're fighting a war just like we are."
Bush seemed skeptical. It was, in fact, hard to think of Wizarding England being at war in any way; it was so peaceful on the lake, and these days, the professors only talked about preparing the seventh-years for their NEWTs. Hogwarts dinners continued at their usual munificence.
"There's nothing about that in our Muggle Studies books."
"That's because they're fifty years out of date. I'm telling you. Muggle England is at war. It has been for years." A pause while Hornblower dragged his fingers through the top of the lake. Flying fish -- not flying now, but with their wings tucked along the sides -- swam up to nudge his fingertips.
"Also," Hornblower said, just thinking of it. "The Head Boy. I don't know whether both of his parents were Muggles, but he goes home to a Muggle orphanage every summer."
"Splendid fellow," Bush agreed, yawning. He was trying to sneak asleep again and Hornblower nudged him again. The lake water wasn't cool enough to do the trick anymore, so he had to poke Bush in the chest. "Best Slytherin at school. After you."
...
The last Quidditch match of the year was Gryffindor against Ravenclaw, and Bush went after Gerard from the start. It was the last real Quidditch match that either of them would ever play, and it dragged into the night. A three-quarters moon against a clear, early summer sky, and Hornblower watched through Omniculars that he'd won from Hesper Grunion at the last Slug Club. Gerard streaked across its face, and Bush followed; they were outlined on the moon. Gerard was too good to be caught by a Bludger moving on its own, and left on his own, he would have destroyed Gryffindor's Keepers.
Eight minutes after midnight, Ravenclaw's Seeker caught the Snitch. Gryffindor won regardless, though, by virtue of outscoring Ravenclaw with Quaffles. Without Gerard's firepower, Gryffindor's chasers forced a margin of victory -- Bush's chasers. Hornblower would not have guessed it of Bush, steady Bush, stolid Bush who was too unimaginative to do well in Transfigurations or lie in his homework for Divinations class, and he cheered until his throat grew hoarse.
...
It was Bush's last night at Hogwarts, and they were in the rowboat past curfew. The lake looked like it was made from black glass, and it was so still, so warm.
"The Head Boy asked special permission to speak at tomorrow's dinner."
Bush looked exhausted. When they had stood on the pier with the lantern, Hornblower thought he saw shadows and lines on Bush's face that had not been there before. Even with all the preparation, the NEWTs had been trying for him, and he had stubble. They had turned the lantern off after they got onto the water, but every now and then, a patch of moonlight would catch Bush's face. It made him look far older than he usually did.
"It's a good speech. I saw it." Hornblower was still hoarse from the Quidditch match. He tried to say more, tried to say that he had seen a draft of it the Slug Club, but Bush smiled at him, and it was clear that no more was needed. Indeed, as Bush rowed them back to shore, he sang For He's a Jolly Good Wizard, softly enough so that he wouldn't wake the squid, but loudly and distinctly enough so that Hornblower could make out the words and decipher which tune it was.
They carried the rowboat back to the land and settled it in the loft, on blocks, with the oars laid in their holders, and then they went out and stood in front of the broom shed. Bush returned the lentern to its holder and blew the light out, and they stood in darkness.
"Goodbye, Bush."
Bush smiled. "I'll visit the Long Rooms this summer, and you'll have to come see me in Chichester."
They smiled at each other for another moment, but that could only delay the moment a little bit. Hornblower held his hand out for a final shake, and perhaps he imagined it, but Bush let go of his hand almost reluctantly, almost with a caress.
"Goodbye."
...
They meet during the summer, of course, multiple times, and they see each other through the following years. Nevertheles, Bush dies in April in the final year of the war. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named disappears at the end of July, and there is an element of irony about it. Hornblower is the one who becomes an Auror, but he survives the War with nothing worse than a bout of typhus. The war takes his children; Maria dies giving birth to a son to replace what he had lost, but Hornblower, himself, is unharmed. Eventually, in fact, he finds peace in laying his memories into a Penseive that Barbara Dumbledore obtains for him.
He has a new life. He is well-respected at the Ministry, working on the beaurocratic side of the Aurors. If he keeps working at it, he is likely to become Minister. His undignified origins have been entirely forgotten, and yet, even in the years of peace that come afterwards, the one thing that Hornblower, as a matter of practicality, cannot lay aside is the fact that his Patronus looks remarkably like a dog whose form occiasionally bleeds into that of a lion. At those moments, Hornblower, himself, is always thinking of a rowboat. Of spring and arithmancy and a friend with his eyes closed.
There are many happier memories. He has other purely happy memories in his life. He has no idea what happened, after Hogwarts, to either Tom Riddle or the rowboat. He only knows what happened to him and Bush; he never had those sea-faring dreams again after Bush died.
It is ridiculous. It is all ridicluous.
Shut up, bitches. Maybe you can believe that this and this don't immediately telegraph OMFG MUST WRITE FOUR THOUSAND WORD FIC ABOUT HORATIO AS A SLYTHERIN OMFG OMFG HE LOOKS LIKE TOM RIDDLE DOESN'T HE ;____________________;, but clearly. I'm the sane one. You're crazy.
Thanks again to rabican and two_if_by_sea.